Martin Daunton

Martin Daunton interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 2nd August 2013
0:05:07 Born in 1949 in Cardiff, south Wales; my parents had married the year before and they were living, rather curiously, in the middle of the city on a farm; in Cardiff the river goes through the city centre and the estate of the Marquis of Bute, which became important for my later academic career; on one side there were castle ground and on the other big park land running up to Llandaff Cathedral; my mother's cousin farmed that land so I was brought up initially on that farm which ran right to the middle of the city centre; as a historian I find the life of my own family uninteresting except to the extent that it illustrates more general phenomenon; my grandparents on my father's side moved from near Bristol to Cardiff in the late nineteenth century when the coal trade was booming; a huge wave of people crossed the Bristol channel to work in the coal mines but my father's father moved over to work in the shipping industry; he was a shipping company clerk, as far as I am aware, at the beginning of his career; sometime about 1900 he joined the Labour Party as one of the founder members in the city and then went to work for the Cooperative Movement; he died in the 1930s but there was that very strong link when I was growing up between my father's family and what was the still the Cooperative Movement; my father went to work for the Cooperative Bank and became a bank manager; there was always that curious situation of being in a good middle-class job but always seeing himself as part of the Labour movement; his elder brother ran the transport fleet for the company although he had trained as a mechanic; so for both there was the blurred line of working-class middle-class; I don't know what the name Daunton means; my father's side were West country Anglicans moving into South Wales; on my mother's side, two generations back they were Welsh-speakers coming from the Vale of Glamorgan where the family lived near Llantwit Major; they were no longer Welsh-speakers by the time I was growing up but very much still Calvinistic Methodists; in South Wales, the tension between the chapel and church was still quite strong when I was born; we went to live in a village outside Cardiff where there was the church, which represented the Anglican establishment, the local landowner - the Jenner family, and the non-conformist chapel; it was not like Northern Ireland, of course, but still there was the idea of the alien Anglican exploiters; I suppose when I was growing up I imbibed the sense of the different culture and political identities which I then became fascinated in as an academic; my mother became more Anglican than the Archbishop over time; her maiden name was Bellett; I have never quite understood where that name came from though I was once in the Conciergerie in Paris, where people were held before being beheaded during the Revolution, and saw the same name on a plaque, so perhaps they were French aristocrats fleeing, though I rather doubt it
6:16:11 I am just interested in the family in the way that they elucidate more general themes, and might, as I get older, think about how the experiences I imbibed unthinkingly might have helped me adopt an attitude about the sort of historical questions it might be worth asking; going back to the Marquis of Bute who owned more or less the whole town of Cardiff and the South Wales coal field; in 1868 the third Marquis became a Catholic, which became the subject of Disraeli's novel 'Lothair', and built this fantasy medieval castle in Cardiff, and lived there in this dream world designed by William Burges; I could see the turrets of Castell Coch out of my bedroom window which look a little like Vilollet le Duc redone in South Wales, realizing later on why I am interested in the way in which Victorian Britain used memories of the past and understood the medieval period, and made me very averse to the sort of interpretation you get from American historians who say that Britain was lost in some sort of nostalgia for the medieval past and this made them anti-industrial, when you see the greatest coal owner in South Wales, one of the most hard-hearted ruthless capitalists, also being this medieval fantasist; I think that growing up in that society made one a little bit more aware of some of the contradictions, tensions and ambivalences of Victorian culture
8:33:11 I am the eldest of three children and have a brother and sister; my sister was born two years after me and she continues to live in South Wales and became a teacher in Tiger Bay, the old dock area of Cardiff; she is a special needs teacher, largely for Somali families, as this is one of the oldest immigrant areas in the country alongside Liverpool, with workers in the shipping industry; my brother is ten years younger and lives in the States; he is a scientist
9:24:04 My parents were not highly educated in the sense of going to university but they had a feeling that they had not achieved what they might have done; my father passed the 11+ and went to the grammar school in Cardiff but left because his father died and went to work when he was 14-15 to support his widowed mother; he joined the army in 1939 and obviously enjoyed his time there because it opened up horizons - I say enjoyed it because I think he never fired a shot in anger or saw the enemy; he spent the time in Palestine and Egypt which gave him a sort of education in Egyptian archaeology and the politics of the Middle East which he always remained interested in; he had a naturally enquiring mind; when he came back from the war he went to work in the bank and worked his way up; he remained very interested in economics and politics and could talk about both; as he had never been to university I think he was living vicariously through the success that I had and always backed that; he didn't want me to have the sort of job that he had but to follow an academic path; on my mother's side, her father also passed the 11+ before the First World War and went to the same grammar school as my father; he joined the army in 1914 under-age; he died about two years after I was born so I never knew him, but from what I understand the war must have been a terrible experience; he was on the front near Ypres throughout the war but would never talk about it; when he came back the photographs of him show a man who looks twenty years older than his chronological age; he went to work in farming so he actually worked with the cousin who ran the farm in the city centre which was rented from the Bute estate, had cows and delivered milk; he was never very well and my mother left school quite early and went to work in a clerical job; again I think there was a feeling that one's development had been stopped by personal circumstances, by the fallout from the war, by the depression of the 1930s which was so bad in South Wales, by sacrificing ambition, and that meant that there was this huge sense of wanting the children to do very well; I think there was a huge expectation from my parents that the children would succeed academically; one of my first memories was sitting on the beach on the Gower peninsula - it must have been about 1962 - and my parents saying that I should aspire to going to university; should say that this was my first significant memory concerning my future; my first actual memory was of the Coronation of course; like most parents, they were annoying in some respects but immensely supportive in others; when my father died there was a service in the church in the village; the Vicar mentioned how proud he was of his children; that could be embarrassing but it gave one the basis to develop
15:13:19 My parents moved from Cardiff in 1952-3 to Wenvoe, a village outside the city, which was curiously like a village in England; it was owned by the Jenner family who also owned the pub which was opposite our house; the younger son of the family was the Rector, they had the Reading Room, the estate workshops, though they had sold the Wenvoe Castle which is now the golf club, but another member of the family ran a farm, and they also built the Church of England school which was just down the road from us; I went to that school which was at that stage still a three-classroom school; the expectation was that most of the children would come from the agricultural workers on the estate, but there were now some middle-class incomers; I was there and my good friend at the time was the son of a consultant at the University Hospital in Cardiff; there was very little sense of providing a thorough education; there were none of the current obsession with tests and metrics; the first-year class was very traditional, I think the teacher was about to retire and one learnt to read and write in a very old-fashioned way; the classroom was heated with a coal fire so it was freezing if you were sitting at the back; it had not been modernized since it was built in the late nineteenth century; we progressed through second and third form, then the fourth form was taught by the head teacher who had been a boxing umpire for the Commonwealth Games in 1958; he was clearly suffering from some illness as he often used to disappear; you would go out to play in the morning and he often forgot to bring you back in; so there was a lack of education until the 11+ came along when only those children whose parents wanted them to pass it would arrange evening classes with him; this meant that some of the very able pupils from less well-off backgrounds were left to fall by the wayside; after I left in 1960 the school was changed and professionalized; I remember that three of us passed the 11+ - the son of the consultant, the son of a lorry driver from the local council estate, and myself; the parents of the son of the lorry driver did not allow him to go to the grammar school but insisted that he went to the secondary modern school; there was no fee involved but a school uniform, but it was more of a sense that it was not for the likes of us; I found it puzzling because he was a very clever person and I sometimes wonder what might have happened to him if he had gone to the grammar school and university
20:23:00 Then went on to Barry Grammar School which was a very curious phenomenon; it was just a grammar school in a small, rather depressed town, in South Wales but it seemed to be punching above its weight in producing academics, and historians in particular; Barry is to the west of Cardiff and was a port built for the export of coal in the late 1880s; Cardiff had the coal export port but also all the offices, banks and service sector; Barry was merely a port for export, a town of about 40,000 people, so it didn't have the wide professional middle-class that you would have in Cardiff; Wenvoe was outside Cardiff city limits; Barry Grammar School was set up as the county grammar school under the 1902 Education Act and had a very famous head teacher who wanted it to be academically very good; when I went there, the head was very traditional and rigid, and I think universally disliked by pupils and teachers; however he made sure that the place was run well with a lot of discipline; the person we all liked was the Deputy Headmaster, Teifion Phillips; he had gone to the school in the late forties and was the history master; when we started doing O level history with Teifion, we had this sense of the intellectual tradition of the school; he had been brought up in the Swansea valleys where his father worked in the pits and had been killed; Teifion walked down the hill to Swansea University, was Welsh-speaking, and remained very much part of the world where he had grown up; he was the chairman of the local Labour Party, very much involved in local politics, an avid reader of the New Statesman, married but without children, and clearly wanted to support his able pupils to do well; one of his first pupils was Keith Thomas; Habakkuk was at the school before that during the thirties; part of the memory, the oral tradition of the school when I was there, was that the Professor or Economic History at Oxford, Habakkuk, later Vice-Chancellor and the Professor of Economic History at Cambridge, David Joslin - one of my predecessors, were both from the school; when we were doing A level history we were given offprints of Keith Thomas's latest articles, so you had a sense that you were in a tradition; Glynn Daniel, the archaeologist, was from the school, and there were a lot of other academics, some of whom were in Swansea University, so very strong intellectual links with Swansea; we used to go down there for lectures; an old boy of the school who went on to Swansea then came back to Barry as the Labour Party candidate, selected by Teifion, which gives a sense of the political life of the place, and that history and politics were interconnected; Teifion went on to become Headmaster; he had his pupils whom he thought were going to do well come to his study on Monday morning, and he would give us an old copy of the New Statesman and we would talk about recent articles in Past and Present, so you were getting a sort of tutorial or supervision that you would get at Oxford or Cambridge; I remember there were three of us; I have completely lost touch with the other two; you didn't have to write an essay but just talk and discuss issues; I remember talking about the scientific revolution, for example, as we were doing sixteenth and seventeenth century history; for some bizarre reason he was a great admirer of Geoffrey Elton's work on Thomas Cromwell which was just coming out at that time in 'The Tudor Revolution in Government'; I remember thinking I didn't believe his argument and having discussions on it, taking the non-Eltonian line as a rather precocious sixteen year old; that was a really good form of education; the school was also connected with the arts which I think is another very important point; another pupil of Teifion was Robert Tear the singer, a choral scholar here at King’s I think; at that time he was singing in some of the Britten premières, so you had that connection, and one of the Spanish teachers, Gwyn Thomas, was a novelist and had two plays on in the West End in London, and was appearing on the Tonight programme on TV, hosted by Cliff Michelmore; Gwyn Thomas would talk about art, politics, and Wales, which he made rather a mystical, Dylan Thomas sort of place; again, he was the son of a miner in the Welsh valleys; I never quite worked out whether he taught Spanish because he had fought in the Spanish Civil War, but that is what I like to think; so although Barry was a sort of curious, miserable place, it did have these wider connections and you never felt cut off from wider intellectual things in British society or wider European society; I also think it was very good for becoming a historian because one wasn't taught British history as if it were English history; English history was something other, through a Welsh lens; so if we were talking about the Tudors, they were originally Welsh, and you would be talking about the Council of the Marches and the imposition of a different form of governance upon a society which was different; it immediately gave on a slightly off-centred view, so made it easier to understand English or British rule in India; we were one of the first colonies; the other person who had a huge influence upon me was the English teacher, Mr John, with whom I kept in touch until he died, as I did with Teifion; we did A level English with him and the first year we didn't look at a single set text; he would come in and tell us to write a short story in the style of someone we could select from a list; I remember doing so in the style of William Faulkner, then another week on Nabokov; then he would tell us to write a poem; he never said why he was doing this and we didn't question him, however he was making you aware of different styles and ways of articulating ideas; in the second year he went off to become a lecturer at the local teacher training college; we had a teacher from Oxford who rigidly went through the set texts; hated it, he was so boring, whereas with Alan John I could still remember his lessons; one of them I remember was analysing a new song by Bob Dylan; I can still remember that, but remembering Milton 'Paradise Lost' Book 1, no; it made me think that a good teacher is someone who makes you think outside the syllabus, outside what you need to know to pass the exam
32:58:03 At school I was not interested in games; the two other boys who went to the special lessons with Teifion, we all disliked sport intensely and were allowed to do cross-country running which meant that we jogged slowly down the road and sat in a field and talked; there was a fourth boy who went on to become a consultant urologist; to my shame I never went to the Cardiff Arms Park and this was the heyday of the Welsh rugby teams all conquering; the thing which really excited me at the time and still does is opera; this was the time that the Welsh National Opera was really starting; I remember going home one day on the bus with somebody who lived in the village who told me that he was going to the opera that night with his parents; he later phoned me to say that his brother could not come and there was a spare seat; it was in a box in the New Theatre in Cardiff, a tiny intimate theatre, and it was the 'Marriage of Figaro'; I thought it was absolutely wonderful; ever since that experience I have been passionate about it; the Welsh National Opera in those days was extremely good and there were some world-class singers who came from Wales who were giving performances to help them; one of the most important was Geraint Evans, a major singer at Covent Garden, I remember seeing him in 'Falstaff', and Stuart Burrows, another up and coming singer, Margaret Price; there was one performance of the 'Magic Flute' where all these famous singers came along and performed together in this tiny theatre; there were also some other operas coming on at that time where the Welsh with the Scots were putting on Janáček; I remember going to hear Jenuta and thought it absolutely phenomenal; Cardiff was very good for music generally as there was the BBC Orchestra of Wales; the University had a very good music school run by Alan Hoddinott who was a composer; I remember going to a concert there given by Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod, and there were string recitals given by the guest quartet in the University of Wales; my parents were very interested in music so my mother from the 1930s had gone Carl Rosa Opera Company and my father's sister married a very good musician who played the organ in Llandaff Cathedral, so there was a sense that they were all interested in music; I was also interested in politics, how could one not be in South Wales at that time; it was almost a one party state except for one constituency which was not Labour, which was Barry; it had become Labour in the 1945 election but then lost in 1950; a woman had held the seat and was a friend of my head teacher; in the 1964 election I remember my father took me to hear Harold Wilson, and the Labour Party candidate in the '64 election was David Marquand; I went to his hustings in the village and it was the first time that I asked a question at a political rally; I think that growing up in that school you were either going to become a professor of economic history or a Labour Party M.P., and we used to joke about that; I don't think any of us became Labour M.Ps but quite a few became academics
39:03:14 When I was doing my Ph.D. thesis I would always be listening to music, and very often to nineteenth century opera; now I can't do that; I wonder why that is; is it because the music is more important and therefore one wants to give one's whole attention to it, it is because writing becomes harder as one gets older and I need to concentrate on that, I don't know; I think my musical taste has changed since those days; when I was younger I would be listening to opera whilst working, whereas now I tend not to play opera at home but to keep it for performance; now I listen much more to chamber music; I wonder whether that is a general sign of becoming older, more introverted, more reflective, I don't know; if I were to be listening to something whilst reading, to get through the tedium of reading another draft of a thesis I have already read three times before, then I would listen to piano music, Debussy or Fauré
41:12:11 When I was growing up my father was the treasurer of the parochial church council and I was an altar boy in the parish church and knew the Rector very well; he was an interesting man who went to Cardiff University and read classics; I used to talk with him about philosophical issues; at university I was still an attending Anglican and for sometime went to the Chaplaincy at Nottingham, and then just drifted away; there was no sudden conversion or being born again; I suppose now there has been a drift back in the sense that it is very comforting to go to evensong in a Cambridge college, to listen to music and have a time for reflection; that does not necessarily mean that one believes what one hears, but sometimes sermons in a Cambridge college can be philosophically interesting; being the head of a Cambridge college, sitting next to the preacher after dinner on a Sunday night is quite entertaining, because I can ask questions about what I have heard in the sermon, without being too critical as that would not be appropriate when someone is in college as a guest; I think as a historian one needs to understand the religious dimension of the past; I think that quite a few of my colleagues in economic history don't do that and I think one should; if you want to understand a nineteenth century businessman who might be a philanthropist, one needs to understand the religious motivations that they have; I continue to be intrigued by religion in terms of what motivates people, and how they live with contradictions; one of the first things that I remember growing up in Cardiff, going to the city centre, going to the National Museum of Wales, I was seeing a statue of man called John Cory, coal owner and philanthropist; I remember thinking at the age of thirteen or fourteen, how could you be a coal owner, in other words a wicked exploiter of the poor, and a philanthropist; he was a Calvinistic Methodist, a temperance supporter, so I started to be intrigued about the different religious experiences of people in the past; I continue to be interested in religion more in a social anthropological sense than in being a believer; I read Keith Thomas's 'Religion and the Decline of Magic' when it first came out in 1971; I graduated in 1970; I am not sure that Keith actually understands religion, but it is a great book and I much enjoyed it
46:13:03 At Nottingham, there were two separate departments, the Department of Economic History which I was in, and the Department of History; there was a two year Part 1, as it is called in Cambridge, which was survey courses where you had to do three subjects; I did economic history, history and sociology; in economic history there were weekly supervisions; in history, which was a third of the first two years, in my recollection there was one supervision a term of about three-quarters of an hour, and the feedback was fairly minimal; I think I would go so far as to say that I only had two supervisions in two years; one with Michael Jones who was a very good historian, and we talked about Burgundy, I think; the other was with Michael Watts who worked on nineteenth century religion; he read my essay and remarked that I'd been taught how to write essays, and keep up the good work, that was it; there was no sense of intellectual exchange that I was used to at school; some of the lecturing in history was really bad; I remember the ones on nineteenth century European history where a young lecturer would come in and we were down to about three people in the room by the end; clearly nothing was done at all about mentoring, student feedback, so that was frankly disappointing; one felt that in the history one was making no progress whatsoever from what we had been taught at school; the economic history was a different matter; we did a survey from the Middle Ages through, and the first person I had was Jan Titow who was a pupil of Michael Postan, and it was almost as if you were hearing the latter; I found that really interesting, talking about the Black Death or medieval field systems, and going off to see the latter at Laxton; some of the other teaching was not terribly good; the teaching of the early modern period was lack-lustre; the teaching of the early nineteenth century was by somebody who was a violent opponent of Edward Thompson which then made us become violent supporters; most of his lectures were summarizing just one book; I still remember him summarizing Charlotte Erickson's book on the background of industrialists in the lace and the steel industries; I had read the book so what was the point of just having it summarised for you; most of us felt that was completely unnecessary; I would not say that the first two years were intellectually exciting apart from Jan Titow, until a young woman came - Helen Mellor; I took her third year special subject and I have remained in touch with her ever since; she reignited the spark which I don't think the first two years did; she did a course on late nineteenth and early twentieth century British social history, the history of cities essentially, which is what did my Ph.D. on; she had studied at Bristol with Bill Ashworth who wrote a very interesting book on the development of town planning and ideas about what cities should be like; I was very interested in that; one of my other interests was architecture; I mentioned growing up in Cardiff and being fascinated by the Burges medieval architecture which at that stage was deeply unfashionable, and looking at churches and castles on the Welsh borders; I also became very interested in modern architecture so after graduating I half toyed with the idea of going into some sort of urbanism work
54:11:12 The third subject that I did was sociology and what I remember most fondly are the courses in the history of sociological thought; that was my first exposure to Max Weber, Durkheim, Herbert Spencer - John Peel, who was one of the lecturers there, was writing a book on Spencer; Peel was an excellent lecturer as was Julius Gould; I was always very interested in taking some of those ideas and applying them to history, but in the economic history department that was not done; there was an interesting lack of connection there; it was also interesting that I didn't study formal economic theory; that was perhaps unfortunate because the professor was A.W. Coats, a very eminent historian of economic thought but he was on leave for the critical year when I could have taken his course; I much regret that as it was something that I subsequently became interested in because I don't like to study the economy by applying formal economic models, I prefer to study how the people of the time thought the economy was functioning; how did Alfred Marshall think that industrial cities and districts were functioning; what were the cultural interpretations of the economy at the time; I suspect that some of that comes from reading the sociology or social anthropology
57:14:19 At Nottingham at that time, the Playhouse was one of the best repertory companies in the country, directed by John Neville; I remember going to 'School for Scandal' directed by Jonathan Miller, which showed the seedy side of Bath society rather than the elegance; there was also the Nottingham Film Theatre in the Lace Market and they had two programmes a week, changing on Wednesday; with friends I would go most weeks to the two new films; this was the time of Pasolini, Bertolucci, Fellini and Bergman; there was not so much music there with a rather indifferent orchestra which I occasionally went to; there was a good music school so there was quite a bit of good music within the University, particularly chamber music; then politics, of course; I went up in 1967 and the events of 1968 arrived in Nottingham in 1969; one of the former students of economic history went off to Warwick to work with Edward Thompson, and he was a Trotskyite; he came back to Nottingham and made some passionate speeches about academic freedom and liberty; at that time there was a professor of French who reputedly phoned a university in France about a student who was going there on a placement, and told them not to take him as he was some sort of Marxist; the secretary or some member of the department was somewhat outraged by this and it became public; then there was a cry around the University to open the files; as a result of that agitation the Registry was occupied and I slept on the floor; I remember we watched Bunuel movies, of course; then the Professor of French was then suspended on full salary without any duties; I remember thinking subsequently that that was a good outcome for him; in early 1970 there was a second sit-in though I can't remember what the issue was; the demands were about student representation on university committees which I believed in very passionately at that time, though a few years later I thought it very adolescent and silly; looking back on it now I think it was exactly what was needed because there was no student voice; I talked about some of the poor teaching; there was no student representation; I think now, chairing university committees or governing body committees in College, the student voice is very often the most intelligent and sensible voice, so in the end I think it was the right thing to do
Second Part
0:05:07 I do find that as Master of Trinity Hall it is useful to have students on the governing body; one of the good things about the College is that the students and staff get on very well together, debate issues in an open way, and the students on the whole are sensible and mature, and keep us on our toes; they are very active on issues like access, going into schools and trying to encourage pupils from less advantaged backgrounds to come to university; they push it on things like should we be a fair trade college, a green college, so they stimulate debate and keep us in touch with issues like gay rights, kosher staircases, grace said in Latin, always asking questions in an intelligent way and making us think; I think that one of the good things about the order of precedence in College, if you come in as a senior professor from outside you are the same standard as the most junior Fellow in terms of pouring the coffee, it doesn't allow you to stand on your dignity, and is a very egalitarian environment
2:40:15 After Nottingham I went on to the University of Kent; Helen Mellor had recommended Theo Barker, who had examined her Ph.D., as my supervisor; Theo had been a Reader at the L.S.E. before going on to be the founding Professor of Economic History at Kent; we met at the L.S.E. and I got on well with him; his wife was an opera singer who had sung in some of the Janacek operas that I mentioned; he was a gregarious, ebullient sort of character; again, like Teifion Phillips, did not have any children, and also liked to encourage younger people; his supervisions were mainly taking you out to dinner; he was a friend of Jim Dyos whom I got to know, and Jim Dyos examined my Ph.D.; Kent University had only opened a few years earlier; it had some very good young economic historians, not much older than me; David Ormrod I have kept in touch with ever since and he is coming to Cambridge to run a big research project; there was a lively seminar culture so was at that stage quite a good place to be, though Theo later became rather disillusioned with it because it wasn't living up to the almost Utopian ideals that he had; he went back to the L.S.E. to become Professor there; later we came together to run a research seminar; I did my Ph.D. on South Wales and that worked out well as Theo had done his Ph.D. on Lancashire, again on the emergence of industrial culture and particularly on St. Helens as a major industrial town, and I was doing the same with South Wales, looking at the coal export trade, shipping industry, the building of a city, the sort of thing that Jim Dyos did on Camberwell; I was trying to pull together the sort of things I had been doing with Helen Mellor in Nottingham and Theo had done on Lancashire, on the emergence of an industrial society; that worked out pretty well; Theo was a bit like Teifion, somebody who just gave you confidence and encouraged; I can't think of anything he said to me which was intellectually exciting but that wasn't the point; he made one think one's own ideas were intellectually exciting and he would give them every support and encouragement; there was a good research seminar every other week, followed by dinner; visiting speakers would come in and was rather like what I am accustomed to now in Cambridge; it is interesting that the people who I have kept in touch with were not my fellow students, but the young academics; at Nottingham, Helen Mellor who was in her first job, when I was 21 and she about 24, and at Kent, David Ormrod, who was about the same age; perhaps it was inevitable because I became an academic at the age of 24; we had similar interests in music and art; I remember going to a seminar in Kent reading a novel; one of the other research students asked me why I was reading a novel as it was a waste of my time; I was also spending a lot of time in archives in London or Wales so I was not in Kent that much, so didn't get to know many graduate students
9:09:03 On research, I was never a one card one fact person; I did start writing things down on cards but abandoned that almost immediately; my first piece of historical writing was on my undergraduate dissertation which was on the Dowlais Iron Company, which had been the world's biggest in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century; when I did research on that it was on letter books, I summarised letters on cards and then shuffled the cards around particular themes to write the dissertation; when I started on the Ph.D. I don't think we were actually told the best way of keeping notes; I did it by summarising and annotating on sheets of paper in files according to the source material; I worked on the Bute archive and kept the notes on that; then when I started to write a chapter or article I would revisit those files according to the question I had in my mind, re-transcribing it in rough order in terms of the themes or parts of the argument; I would initially do that by writing it - this was before computers - and that would give me a rough shape, and a digest of material from various files; then I would type a version of more connected prose, mark it up, edit it heavily with pen, and then retype it as a finished article; I think that is more or less how I have continued to work, though now I would do the sorting bit on a computer; I get a very crude draft going back to the notes, put it into a rough order, redoing it, typing it up, marking it heavily with a fountain pen - it has to be that - then typing it again; with a computer I might do that four or five times rather than once; there is something comforting about the solidity of a fountain pen and the legibility of the handwriting as well; on where I work, things have changed as I have got older; in my first job at Durham and then in London I used to write at home not in the office where I found it impossible to write; my normal routine would be to start writing at nine o'clock after reading the newspaper; would work for two hours, take a break, read novel, go in the garden, then do another two hours until lunch; I would take an hour for lunch and then do the same in the afternoon and possibly something after dinner; what I always used to do with writing was to do it for three days intensively; when I first came to Cambridge we had a house on the coast in Suffolk; my routine in the summer was to go there on Tuesday evening, write solidly Wednesday to Friday, my wife would come over on Friday evening; I would do some writing at the weekend but would also go for a long walk, think about issues while walking, and sometimes discuss thoughts with my wife; normally when I sit down to writing I have worked out in my head what the argument is; I used to do the same when teaching at University College London; we had a house in Islington and there one didn't go into the office except for teaching; in the summer I used to spend most the the time at home writing; now I find it very difficult because being the head of a college and having a university administrative job it is almost impossible to get a solid day; so writing is very much in snatches which is much more difficult; I will be retiring from the college but not from the university; I have the job of Head of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences but I think that will free up more weekends and evenings which are taken up with college at present; I both enjoy writing but also find it a strain; I find writing a book a strain and sometimes ask myself why I am doing it; if I am writing a lecture I find that very easy; I have been mulling over why that is; I am trying to write a book at the moment and had a meeting with my publisher earlier this week; I had the synopsis which was fifty pages of typescript; I read it before meeting him and thought it quite well-written with a pace to it; then I looked at the typescript of the book and thought it dull, overly detailed and turgid, and thought I should write it like the synopsis; this is the problem of being captured by the archival material which I have lovingly collected in archives in this country and the States, and I want to put in every bit of it; I always say to my students don't do that; so I have got to get the tone of voice of the synopsis or the lecture which is written in a much more conversational tone back into the book; I remember Jim Dyos saying to me when he was examining my Ph.D. thesis that he always read everything he wrote out loud to his wife, conversationally
19:33:08 The new book is addressed to the sort of person who might pick up the Financial Times or the Economist, somebody who is not a historian but is thinking about what it the nature of the world economy, the political economy, that we are facing at the moment; the working title of the book is 'The Economic Governance of the World since 1933' - a phrase taken from Maynard Keynes - a rather foolhardy topic; it starts with the World Economic Conference of 1933 which is an attempt to address the problems of the slump of the Great Depression which failed; it then goes to the setting up of the war time and post-war institutions, some of which succeed and some fail; the World Bank and IMF succeed whereas the International Trade Organization, later World Trade Organization didn't succeed; you have the interim body of GATT; so I am looking at how one designs institutions, what is the process by which they set agenda, what is the voting system within them, who has voice and who not, how do they become deadlocked and how avoid doing so, what voices are excluded; one reason why the International Trade Organization doesn't work was that it initially tried to incorporate the voices of the less-developed countries and that alienated American domestic opinion; they are then excluded from GATT, then get their voice back in through other bodies like UNCTAD; that leads through to today where we again have an international organization, the World Trade Organization which is trying to incorporate all of these voices but hasn't actually produced an outcome; so I am trying to consider what makes some international institutions work, some fail, how are they structured, what views of distributive justice in the world economy are in the ascendant at any one time, trying to destabilize the notions of the neo-liberal economics, the Washington consensus, by bringing other voices, that is more or less what it is about
22:43:04 I don't have eureka moments; it is just dogged determination, nagging away at something; perhaps I am not asking big enough questions for eureka moments; I tend to start with a more finite question that are very often triggered by things I see around me; if I go back to my first job in Durham in 1973, it was the time of miners' strikes and I had been in South Wales as well finishing off my Ph.D., so I moved from one area to the other during the strikes; I remember thinking why is it that the miners in the North East of England are so moderate and conservative whereas those of South Wales are incredibly militant - a historical question comparing those two areas; if there was a eureka moment it was thinking this might be something to do with generational conflict and the way the workplace was organized underground; so I started to think then about the family structures and the generation mobility systems in the two areas, and why that might have led to different forms of outcome; I am not sure if it was a eureka moment but it was connecting thing that I hadn't ever previously put together in my mind
25:25:03 I am not particularly satisfied with anything and as soon as I write something I wish I hadn't done it that way; the thing that has been most read and had the most influence is the work on taxation; the question was why are some taxes legitimate and accepted by the tax payers without tax revolt whereas others are not; this does not have much to do with the level of taxation as a percentage of GNP, and that is of current relevance because of the debate over the 90% rule and the argument of Reinhart and Rogoff which is if you go above a 90% debt to GDP ratio then economic growth will fall by 1%; this has been taken up by the Republicans in America and is much-quoted by George Osborne in this country to justify austerity; historically it is flawed; so one then needs to think about why in certain periods high debt to GDP ratio lead to growth, why at some points is the high level of debt politicised while in other periods it is not; the work that I did on the impact of the Napoleonic wars and of the first and second world wars, when debt to GDP ratios go to about 200%, is something that I am most pleased about; at the end of the Napoleonic wars you have huge resistance to the level of debt, and it is what the Chartists and radicals are arguing about, and how did the Government negotiate around those tensions; at the end of the First World War, in Britain there was some resistance to the level of debt such as the Daily Mail anti-waste campaign, but you didn't end up with the serious problems of Germany, France or Italy of debt default and tax revolt; understanding what it was about the nature of the British State and the British fiscal system which allowed that to be negotiated, and the high level of debt and taxation to be established in the inter-war period so that when Britain entered the Depression it already had a reasonably good welfare system, I think is an important question; America entered the Depression without a high level of taxation because Andrew Mellon slashed taxes in the twenties; so trying to work out what leads to a legitimate, accepted tax system, securing tax-payer consent is one piece I am pleased about; in retirement, one book I want to write is about the system of taxation within the British Empire because the same sorts of issues occurred in India and Africa and helped to establish the sorts of states you have there now; I have been involved with some colleagues in Japan working on the Shoup mission to Japan after the First World War and what sort of tax state should be created there; I was also quite pleased about the book I did on housing, although I would do that slightly differently now and I might go back to it because I started writing about housing at the time that Mrs Thatcher was privatizing council housing; the question came to my mind as to why we had council housing in the first place; a lot of assumptions from the Labour Party was that was a natural thing to have, but was it; I tried to understand why at the time of the First World War we moved from a system of private sector rental housing with the emergence of socialised housing in terms of housing associations, and welfare systems based on autonomous bodies run by workers, to a highly collectivised centralised system; I tried to understand why something that was unexpected if you take a standpoint in 1900, came to pass; the only problem with writing about that was that I discovered the final chapter of my book was then copied by the Minister of Housing and sent around to justify the privatization of council houses, which is not exactly what I was expecting; nowadays with council housing having been sold off and the return of the private rental sector, I think that I need to rewrite that book and take it to another stage; so a lot of what I am most pleased about are historical arguments which still have current resonance; I think that is partly because when I started out reading economic history I was never quite sure if I wanted to become a historian or a political scientist; I have always worked rather on the interface between those things so that even when I am writing pure history I am interested in how policy is made, why do some ideas have resonance, how do state structures shape the ability to have different forms of policy of different taxation; I think perhaps those two books am I most happy about
33:06:17 I went to Durham in 1973 where again there were two separate departments, history and economic history, which I think is a very unhealthy divide; the head of the history department was Hilary Seton Offler, a very intriguing man whose father had apparently been a German bandsman in Britain; he was an expert on William of Ockham and had edited volume one of the works; everybody just waited for volume two; the only other thing he published was a Short History of Switzerland; it was thought that when he died there would be a drawer full of works, and there was nothing; whenever somebody in the department of history wrote something he would suggest putting it in a drawer to mature; there was a feeling of no rush to publish, of the gentlemanly scholar sort of argument, and the number of people in the department who did publish was very low; in the economic history department where I was there were some very good people; Richard Britnell, a medievalist, although when I was there he hadn't published very much; I left in 1979 and since then there has been a flood of very important books; he wasn't allowed to teach medieval history; the Head of Department, Frank Spooner, wanted to teach courses which were by theme - land, labour, enterprise, and I did cities; Richard had to do land and agriculture, but wasn't allowed to do the Middle Ages so he taught eighteenth-century Scotland; it was only when Frank Spooner retired that he was able to link his research into his teaching; Duncan Bythell who taught the labour part wrote a very good book on the hand-loom weavers of the industrial revolution of Lancashire, where he came from; around the time I arrived he wrote another book on sweated labour, and then he stopped writing; there was no sense of encouragement; now with the RAE it is the opposite problem; we are all encouraged to write our four outputs during the period, whether or not we feel that we have anything to say, or perhaps we ought to be writing one big book rather than short articles; Ranald Michie arrived in 1974 and I think we have both written a lot; Ranald is an expert on finance and has written a lot about the stock market and the City of London; the culture then changed and by the first or early RAEs the history departments at Durham merged, and then got one of the top gradings as a result of the fundamental shift in cultures
37:53:08 I came to Cambridge in 1997; it delighted and intrigued me; I had been teaching at University College, London, from 1979 and had thought I would stay there until I retired; I loved living in London, and University College is an amazing place; however there was a problem about what I was teaching; I was trying to teach economic history within this wider historical, political thought, framework; we had a course on twentieth century British history and I would do that and a colleague taught the political history; in supervisions my colleague would not deal with the other part, and it became very difficult to do the sort of intellectual work that I was interested in; Cambridge is fundamentally different because all students have to do a course in economic history in the history faculty, so what I was interested in became integral to the teaching of undergraduates; there is a large group of us interested in the same thing, having the same sort of approach, not looking at economic history through cliometrics, which is what happened at the L.S.E. or Warwick, but looking at the economy as a cultural construct; in coming to Cambridge I immediately felt intellectually liberated by having colleagues who have the same sort of mindset; I suppose, looking at it the other way, that is why I was appointed; some time after I arrived I put on a special subject which is the basis of the book I am trying to write, and some of the students on that were just stunning - this was on the political economy of the world from 1939-73, from the creation and demise of the Bretton Woods regime; some of those students went on to do Ph.Ds, one is working on the Financial Times, one is in the Treasury; the students here were different not better, but are more akin to my idea because of the sort of history we teach; the thing that I found most curious about Cambridge was the method of teaching; Part 1 history, a two year degree, the emphasis upon one to one supervision, which I think is good in the first year when students are learning to write essays and how to argue, but they didn't have seminars where they learnt to debate amongst themselves, which we did have in London; in the third year in London the special subjects which were on the detailed archival work, were capped to an upper limit of about 18; in Cambridge I was quite shocked to find that some special subjects had 80 student which had to be split into two groups of 40; you can't really have a debate with that number; I felt there was a mismatch on where the emphasis on the teaching was; the most I ever had in my own special subject was 18, and with that number of very bright students in a room I didn't have to teach; I would just go in and introduce the documents we were to look at and off they'd go; my role was to nudge and steer; I found that really stimulating and the best teaching I have ever had
43:27:24 I never thought I would end up in Cambridge, I never thought I would end up as Master of a Cambridge college; one thing I had found disappointing about University College is that one came in to do one's teaching, ate one's sandwiches at one's computer as there was virtually no common room, one never got to know people in the science departments or even in economics except occasionally on committees; I came first to Churchill College as a Fellow and remember one day sitting next to an economist and were talking about why levels of public spending vary in different societies over time; I came up with an idea of a U shape, if you have a limited franchise you might have high public spending, if you then widen it there might be less public spending, and if you get a universal franchise it might go up again; he suggested we tested it and we got an ESRC grant with an econometrician in the economics department; we found that there was this relationship, and that the bottom of the U was 60%, so if 60% of people have the vote you have low public spending, but if you go above or below 60% it is higher; it was a simple model that we enjoyed testing, but it was having that conversation, and also conversations with sociologists, scientists, etc., that exchange of ideas in a free and easy manner because you are not in a seminar, or exchanging ideas on music or the latest novels, it just endlessly stimulating; I like that, and the students get the same out of it; one of the great things about being the head of a college is that one gets to know the students, inviting them into the Lodge, getting to know what excites them; they tell me what I should be reading or which films to see, so I pick up what twenty year olds are doing and they learn what I am doing; I find that ready-made community and exchange of ideas so stimulating, that's what it is all about; it gives the students confidence and keeps me young
47:19:01 This system we have to keep, but as Cambridge is becoming bigger and house prices higher, it becomes more difficult; I found that it changed one's working habits because more evenings than not we are entertaining within the College or out with other people, which is good; I suppose the thing we initially found rather difficult is that living in London we would go home to Islington and you got to know people in that area who were not academics; our neighbours were medics, journalists, lawyers, a banker who became a furniture maker, so one wasn't in a bubble of a university; coming into Cambridge in 1997 without having been here we found it difficult to get to know people living in the community rather than the university; we have finally broken through with that in Little Wilbraham and have got to know people in the village as it is a very sociable place; for the last two weekends there have been garden parties, and we have got to know retired business people, a farmer, a landowner, there is a pub run by Trinity Hall alumni; inevitably there are a lot of academics and medics from Addenbrookes
50:24:16 I met my wife at University College where she was working on the Bentham project; she read history in London at Bedford College and she was taught by some of the people I worked with later on like Michael Thompson, so we knew people within the same circle; she left to work in Brussels for the European Commission, setting up the archive; I went out to see her for a weekend and we got married very soon after that; she could have stayed with the archive which was set up in Florence but came back to London; the then worked freelance setting up archives for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the London Hospital, and the archive of Bedford College and Royal Holloway, which is one of the great archives of women's education; she was then offered the job of going into administration at the London Hospital, which she did; then she went to the Institute of Psychiatry, the Bethlem and the Maudsley Hospital, partly looking after the archive as the Bethlem is 800 years old, and the art collection, and writing manuals for treatment of people with mental illnesses to explain to the patients what was happening to them; she could have stayed there when I got the job in Cambridge; I was told that I had to live within twenty miles of the centre of Cambridge, so we decided to move here and Claire joined the University administration; she became the administrator of the Faculty of English; she had always had an ambition to do a Ph.D. which she had started long before at the LSE, and she resigned, did the Ph.D. and is now teaching in the University, giving lectures, writing, and enjoying life